From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-2.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILING_LIST_MULTI autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,a875d9649dde34e3 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news2.google.com!proxad.net!freenix!enst.fr!melchior!cuivre.fr.eu.org!melchior.frmug.org!not-for-mail From: "Robert C. Leif" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: GWindows and a future home for it Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 23:20:58 -0700 Organization: Newport Instruments Message-ID: Reply-To: rleif@rleif.com NNTP-Posting-Host: lovelace.ada-france.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: melchior.cuivre.fr.eu.org 1097130078 42744 212.85.156.195 (7 Oct 2004 06:21:18 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@melchior.cuivre.fr.eu.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 06:21:18 +0000 (UTC) To: Return-Path: X-Authenticated-User: rleif.rleif.com X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook, Build 11.0.6353 Thread-Index: AcSsNcWaeey2wVw3SD6FXnRwL7DDKQ== X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.2180 X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new-20030616-p10 (Debian) at ada-france.org X-BeenThere: comp.lang.ada@ada-france.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.4 Precedence: list List-Id: "Gateway to the comp.lang.ada Usenet newsgroup" List-Unsubscribe: , List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:4852 Date: 2004-10-06T23:20:58-07:00 I appreciate Marius' kind words. I apologize in advance for the length of my comments. An example of the source of my continuing motivation to foster the development of commercial products occurred today. FrameMaker 7.1 document processor further increased my motivation when it unsuccessfully tried to produce a Word file and scrambled some cross-references in the original file of my latest chemistry patent application. For me this is a mission critical application. In case anyone is interested, the cross-referencing and column numbering technology in Word are unsuitable for this task. Since FrameMaker is expensive, my use of it establishes that like most scientists, I am motivated to spend money on products. Lawyers and physicians also need reliable products. Previously, having been depressed by Ada's lack of commercial success and frustrated by the unreliable and poor software I use at work (see above), I came up with the obvious way to increase the commercial use of Ada; it was to apply the old American adage, "Money talks". A few Ada millionaires would be the best counterargument to the C group of languages aficionados. One simple business observation about the largest software corporation, Microsoft, is that the company has very nice buildings and treats its employees very well. In short, there is a very significant overhead and salary component in its costs. Ada technology fortunately provides a means to eliminate most of the corporate building and overhead costs and to change the economic model of software development from a centralized to a decentralized structure. In fact, Randy Brukardt and Tom Moran have demonstrated with CLAW the feasibility of distributed Ada development. I believe that with Ada because of its readability, use of separate specifications, etc. the scaling from 2 developers to 100 or 1,000 distributed developers is possible. Ada also has the advantage that the number of developers required is inversely proportional to their productivity. However, these technological advantages do not provide a sufficient business case for the use of Ada. The use of Ada has the very large commercial advantage in that an ASIS program can be created that divides up the royalties paid to the developers. This will remove very significant legal and accounting costs as well as upfront capital investment. A software based method to calculate compensation will permit the use of down-stream and evolved or mutated software components. If a product is successful, it will assure the upstream developers obtain a good return for their initial effort. As we all know, software design is a critical component. Frankly, it would be a very high-risk undertaking to start a business composed of software experts who had minimal domain knowledge of a commercial product. However, this risk factor is mitigated by the use of existing well-thought-out designs. We are now well along in what is an XML centric market. If we build products that are based on the World Wide Web Consortium standards, much of the design and domain knowledge problems are mitigated. This type of development is further simplified by the semantic similarity between Ada and XML schema. I also have a gut feeling that Ada program designers would realize that there was significant commonality between a table in document and a spreadsheet. I suspect that a simple object based design could result in much smaller and fast packages. Since we already have the Commercial Ada Users Working Group (CAUWEG), I can think of no better aim for CAUWEG than the commercial use of Ada. Yours, Bob Leif Message: 4 Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2004 22:28:36 +0100 From: Marius Amado Alves Subject: Re: GWindows and a future home for it To: comp.lang.ada@ada-france.org Message-ID: <41646384.6030805@netcabo.pt> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Hyman Rosen wrote: > ... the practical problems of > such "fair source" licenses will doom them. > ... The weight of legal and > accounting requirements to track these is just as heavy > as for closed-source packages. In that case I see no problem, because proprietary software does not seem to be suffering from this :-) Of course managing shares in fair source is more complicated than in open source--where there are none. But we think it can be done, and we're working toward putting some tools in place for it. See for example the Relative Credit Scheme and the respective provisions in Bob Leif's Ada Developers Cooperative License. > ... Just because some programmer wants to make money does not > obligate anyone else to march to his drumbeat. Well, you can just say it the other way around: if some programmer does not want to make money... Anyway in fair source any author can forfeit his right to be rewarded. Thanks for your time and knowledge. I'll take a look at the Id Sender business.